As I suggested yesterday, I’d like to get back to rewriting the story of my father into a readable 250 pages (the first draft, which you can see here as it emerged, is about 1,200 pages) but I’ve been unaccountably distracted by the worldwide resurgence of the kind of fascism that always leads to mass murder, after years of brutal repression. The world’s getting a little appetizer in the deliberate war crimes Trumpie’s pal Putin is committing in a war of unprovoked aggression against the civilians of Ukraine [1].
The movement we have here has been on the move for decades, pretty much since the New Deal programs began, funding their dozens or hundreds of powerful octopus arms with billions in hereditary wealth, determined to destroy the administrative state, all social programs, and reserve government coercion for poor people who don’t have shit to say about it. These are the same supremely entitled motherfuckers who are always upset when “entitlements” like Social Security, child labor laws, anti-pollution laws, unemployment insurance, pro-labor and pro-environmental enforcement agencies, government–subsidized private health insurance for the old, the poor, a century- belated ruling that segregation is unconstitutional, anti-lynching laws and so forth become the normal expectations of ordinary American citizens.
Globalist is usually right-wing code for “nefarious fuckingsocialist Jews” (which, as a nefarious fucking socialist Jew, I am allowed to say, happy Passover, y’all) but it applies much more accurately to the global coordination between extreme right wing parties. When it comes to the international fascist movement, Sloppy Steve Bannon is right there, 100% gung ho, ready to be a muscular martyr for the cause. Ditto angry Trump confidante Stephen Miller, racist Jeff Sessions’s protege and loyal Trumpist in the bunker with the mad former president. Furrow-browed Tucker Carlson, TV dinner fortune heir (and the political party Carlson propagandizes for), loves Victor Orban, the Hungarian fascist, and hosted his FOX show in Hungary, a model society for his ilk — why do gays need rights? Why should I be against Putin, he never called me a bad name? Why do George Soros and the Clintons hate our freedom so much? How do we actually know Trump wasn’t cheated, along with the rest of us, in a cleverly rigged election? Why are Blacks always angrily complaining about unarmed family members being killed by cops when whites never do? Why do I always pose these hateful things as questions? Do you want to get sued for directly defamatory, or prosecuted for treasonous, behavior? Do you actually believe my viewers want nuanced answers? Do I not give them answers they already know every night, in the form of leading questions?
So, yeah, I’m distracted, I don’t know why, keeping one eye on the 50/50 chance we will have our own one party state, bound by a Fuhrer’s Oath of personal loyalty to a compulsive liar and vindictive king of open corruption, where a timid but comparatively decent party bows to the will of violent mobs and submits peacefully to their own public executions. C’est la vie, I suppose.
[1]
Not to say the US didn’t do virtually the identical thing under the aptly named Dick Cheney when it launched a preemptive war, based on lies told over and over to the citizens of the US and the world, against Iraq a few decades back. How many Iraqi children and old people did we kill, maim, turn into homeless refugees? We will never have an accurate count of the many thousands our smart and stupid bombs killed or crippled, though the number of brown refugees who fled the brutal “liberation” of Iraq was in the millions.
You want a scary story? The money you have in your pocket is losingvalue!
The pandemic seems to be winding down, and now with a centrist non-authoritarian in the White House, one who has shown a willingness to impose modest taxes on the wealthiest 0.01% of our finest citizens, human and corporate alike, the corporate media’s story seems unable to focus on the steady economic recovery in the USA, it must be on a crisis — and the failure of a reasonably competentDemocraticpresident to fix things beyond any president’s control and against a united party determined to see him fail. Here’s the Grey Lady the other day, hammering a familiar corporate theme:
Gasoline weighed heavily in the increases, hmmm, oil company profits hit all-time highs. Hmmmm… maybe there’s another explanation for corporate leaders using Biden as a punching bag for this worldwide rise in gasoline prices and worldwide inflation…
Here’s Robert Reich:
people, just like you and me! For the love of God, haven’t they and their billionaire human counterparts been crucified enough by class and social justice warriors? Will the vicious attacks on our greatest never cease?
Probably not.
Not that they have any reason to care about that very much…
As the Fuhrer approvinglypointed out, in his admiring analysis of Allied propaganda in World War One, swapping in an incendiary, false caption under an actual photo is a powerful technique to make masses of people experience targeted rage and hatred. And, as we see in this brutal age of “social media”, it never gets old:
Here is an actual photo of a crazed narcotics-addicted left-wing extremist US Congressman falling asleep mid-sentence on liberal media, to the clear horror of the left-wing host.
Here is the Clinton News Network, with a typical example of their biased lying, simply to make a universally adored very stable genius look like a childish imbecile:
It is hard to keep track of all the flying poop, as thoughtful Merrick Garland knits his brow over the facts and the law and how best to follow them, but this model prosecution memo, by Barbara McQuade, lays some of it out — the part about Trump’s plan to coerce Pence to throw out votes that made him lose the election, and the conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding — as clearly as possible. Then she analyzes the legal cases. The actions taken by the conspirators were varied, frenzied and included throwing every possible kind of shit against the wall to see what might stick as a talking point on right wing media to amplify widespread belief in unfounded lies and justify overturning an election lost by the incumbent. Here are a few nuggets (her full memo is linked at the bottom of this post):
In a separate suit, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tx) brought an action on Dec. 28 to declare Pence had authority to reject the election results. In a response submitted by the Justice Department on Dec. 31, Pence opposed the suit.[47] Pence’s brief said, “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.” The district court and court of appeals dismissed the suit in the following two days. . .
. . . Later on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump and attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman conducted a Zoom conference call with 300 legislators from swing states won by Biden.[55] According to Michigan State Sen. Ed McBroom (R), who participated in the call, the Trump team urged the legislators to overturn the choice of voters in their states, but provided no evidence of voter fraud.[56] As McBroom reported: “I was listening to hear whether they had any evidence to substantiate claims” of significant voter fraud that could change the results in Michigan.”[57] “(T)he callers did not provide additional information, he said, and he did not support a delay in the electoral vote count.”[58] . . .
. . . Also on Jan. 5, Eastman met with Short and Jacob at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Eastman argued that Pence should reject the Biden electors, according to two sources.[104] By the end of the two-hour meeting, Eastman had conceded that having Pence reject Biden electors was not a viable plan. Eastman later denied so conceding.[105] . . .
. . . Late on the evening of Jan. 5, Trump issued a false statement that Pence had agreed to take action beyond counting votes on Jan. 6.[110] According to reporting, Trump directed his campaign to issue a statement that he and Pence were in “total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” In fact, this statement was false, the exact opposite of Pence’s position, and was issued without consulting with the vice president or his office.[111] Soon after issuing the statement, Trump called Giuliani and then called Steve Bannon who was also at the Willard Hotel. Trump said that Pence had not caved. Pence was “very arrogant,” Trump repeatedly said.[112]
[even fascistic secret torture memo author/professor John Yoo advised Pence he had no legal right to do what Trump had demanded]
“I advised that there was no factual basis for Mike Pence to intervene and overturn the results of the election,” said Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. “There are certain limited situations where I thought the Vice President does have a role, for example in the event that a state sends two different electoral results. . . . But none of those were present here.”[140] . . .
. . . At about 2 p.m., protestors broke a window at the U.S. Capitol and climbed inside.[142] The Senate and House of Representatives soon went into recess and members evacuated the two chambers.[143] At 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”[144] The Capitol would not be secured again until about 6 p.m.[145] . . .
Barbara McQuade concludes that
This evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain convictions of charges for conspiracy to defraud the United States and for obstruction of an official proceeding.
and lays out the case for each. She acknowledges certain dangers in prosecuting a former president with an angry private army, but concludes the only thing worse than the possibility of deadly violence by his followers is not prosecuting the lawless turd.Merrick?
It’s quite possible that people like Mitch McConnell are born corrupt, I don’t know. But how do you forcefully condemn an angry, corrupt president for being a sore loser mad enough to organize and unleash a violent mob to kill your enemies, after orchestrating his acquittal in a proceeding to make sure he never runs again, and then support his future candidacy? Mitch explains:
If you are a history teacher in a state that has a right wing legislature and governor (and it has been a concerted project of the right to capture as many Independent State Legislatures as possible, along with the federal courts) your career may be in danger if you ask your students to google Red Summer. You see, having students click on a website that documents dozens of little known racist massacres of a hundred years ago will undoubtedly make innocent, white, Christian kids feel bad. History can be a very mean adolescent girl.
This largely forgotten season of racist violence and horror, painted red with the blood of its innocent victims (among them many Black WWI vets), does not even include bloody mayhem like the now infamous massacre and destruction of the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa (1921) or plenty of others we hear about, to our surprise, from time to time. The Atlanta race riot of 1906, for example. At exactly the moment the last Russian Czar was winking at massacres of Jews, called pogroms, white leaders here were acquitting everyone involved in our own anti-Black pogroms, while punishing any surviving Blacks who may have been seen fighting back.
After the Civil War the only southerners who faced any consequence for taking up arms to fight in the “Northern War of Aggression” (apart from the Confederate warden of the infamous Andersonville Prison camp, an early concentration camp where thousands died, who was executed for his war crimes) were the Black veterans of the Union army, routinely tortured and murdered for standing up for their constitutional rights. See, e.g. Colfax Massacre, Easter Sunday 1872.
Teach this sort of bloody history at your own risk, Florida history teachers. According to our own shamelessly pandering white nationalists in various state and federal offices, it is strictly up to the states to decide how American history will be taught to future generations, fucking anti-racist, anti-fascist freedom haters! That’s the lesson of the Civil War, Independent State Legislatures get to decide the intimate fates of their citizens, as well as the last word letting them vote and, more importantly, on counting their ballots! Independent State Legislature Doctrine, bitches.
When, on Election Night 2020, Donald Trump announced, as the votes were being counted, that he frankly did win a rigged election, it was just they they kept counting these late, fake votes, he was nodding to his plan, with PostMaster General/Trump megadonor Louie DeJoy, to delay millions of mail-in ballots until they arrived too late to be counted.
Trump and DeJoy had done everything imaginable to make it harder to vote by mail: removed mailboxes in Democratic-leaning areas, dismantled high speed mail sorting machines in several Democratic voting cities, announced slowdowns in mail delivery, suspended overtime pay customarily paid to ensure prompt delivery.
Hans von Spakovsky, insane far right conspiracy-monger and keeper of the Voter Fraud Database at Heritage Foundation (documenting the steady infinitesimal fraction of fraudulent votes, a hundredth of a tenth of a percent — 0.001% — fraud since the 1980s), met secretly with the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA, MAGA, RAGA!) prior to the 2020 election to limit drop boxes in large Democratic counties and engage in other chicanery that would advantage the bloated Orange faux populist in an election he was in grave danger of losing.
Trump and his people brought hundreds of extremely feeble court cases, prior to the election, based on unfounded theories of massive Democratic election fraud, trying to limit absentee voting in all forms during the deadliest phase of the Trump pandemic. None of these Hail Mary cases had the desired results, though Boof Kavanaugh and co. tried their best with a couple that reached the top court.
Frankly, we did win, in an historic landslide, he still insists, frankly. Frankly, this election was rigged, by us, but not well enough apparently, to stop the counting of votes at 10 pm Election night when I was still leading in all the tallies, though fading fast because of a fake flood of massive Democrat [sic] fraud in a rigged election that brought many more Republicans to power than expected but, on the same ballots, fraudulently fucked the rightful president.
We learned recently (unless you get your news from FOX, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart or Der Sturmer) that two days after the election, before the final count was certified, and showed that Trump lost to Biden by a healthy margin, the defeated president’s oldest boy was already at work (this was treacherously revealed by the traitorous Liz Cheney and her friends on the fake January 6 Committee) texting the White House chief of staff, hatching the mad, multi-pronged plan to keep his father in power, using all the leverage at the president’s disposal.
Once this shit-show stolen election nonsense and the riot that stopped the certification of Biden’s victory for several hours were officially over (they’ll never be over to a good 30% of the very best Americans!), it was time for norms and democracy to reassert themselves. Or so it appeared to many Americans.
Talk of doing away with the elitist Electoral College that put Trump and the aptly named Dick Cheney in office over the will of the voters? No, not any more, we’re too divided, too many other pressing problems, like stopping the next insurrection/tourist visit/legitimate violent political discourse. Talk of adding five justices to the Supreme Court? No, it sounds too partisan when we already have a partisan 6-3 Trump majority poised to invalidate much of the constitutional order. Talk of ending the filibuster for Voting Rights, as it was ended to put three Federalist Society vetted extremists on the Supreme Court, each one appointed by a slim, sub-filibuster majority? Well, there was some talk, but talk is cheap. So is Trump, the Republican National Committee is picking up the tab for his dozens of ongoing and past lawsuits. To be determined, will they pay his legal bills when Merrick Garland finally follows the facts and the law and… whoa! they directly lead to… unbelievable, the former president . . . the DOJ finally prosecutes the Notorious Orange Polyp for a few of his many crimes against democracy?
Frankly, we should find that out before very much longer, or my name isn’t Robert Mueller the Third!
It depends entirely on how extreme the right wing majority of the Supreme Court is at any given time.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Eisenhower appointee and bitter disappointment to lovers of the status quo (the Koch Brothers’s loveless father Fred was a charter member of the “Impeach Earl Warren” John Birch Society, which arose after Brown v. Board ruled in 1954 that segregation in schools was unconstitutional) wrote the 9-0 opinion that struck down laws like Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Here’s the Republican chief justice starting off the unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia, one of the cases Trump’s base courting followers are prepared to revisit with an eye to overturning, returning the power to violate post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution in the name of illimitable States’ Rights and “federalism”:
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.[n1] For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.
In June, 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court[p3] of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge, and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
How could any God-fearing, authoritarian personality having white person, in the throes of racial pride, dispute this common sense 1959 opinion of a totally non-racist Virginia judge?
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Malay?
Originalists, or textualists, harken back to the “original intent” of the Framers of the Constitution in 1789, gleaned from the centuries old writings they left, which are, according to them, as sacred and inviolable as the other articles of their deep religious faith, as indisputable as the fact that God dictated much of the Old and New Testaments. Originalism, by going back to 1789, removes focus from the evolution of the document, the evolution of our democracy, and the freedom and equality-expanding amendments starting right after the Civil War and continuing through a woman’s right to vote, more than a half century later, and, eventually, starting in 1965, the actual federal enforcement of most of these rights.
The two statutes under which appellants were convicted and sentenced are part of a comprehensive statutory scheme aimed at prohibiting and punishing interracial marriages. The Lovings were convicted of violating § 258 of the Virginia Code:
Leaving State to evade law. — If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.
Section 259, which defines the penalty for miscegenation, provides:
Punishment for marriage. — If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.
Other central provisions in the Virginia statutory scheme are § 20-57, which automatically voids all marriages between “a white person and a colored person” without any judicial proceeding,[n3] and §§ 20-54 and 1-14 which,[p5] respectively, define “white persons” and “colored persons and Indians” for purposes of the statutory prohibitions.
Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications.[n5] Penalties for miscegenation arose as an incident to slavery, and have been common in Virginia since the colonial period.[n6] The present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the First World War. The central features of this Act, and current Virginia law, are the absolute prohibition of a “white person” marrying other than another “white person,”[n7] a prohibition against issuing marriage licenses until the issuing official is satisfied that[p7] the applicants’ statements as to their race are correct,[n8] certificates of “racial composition” to be kept by both local and state registrars,[n9] and the carrying forward of earlier prohibitions against racial intermarriage.[n10]
Here is the state of Virginia’s argument, summarized by Warren:
Thus, the State contends that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race. The second argument advanced by the State assumes the validity of its equal application theory. The argument is that, if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because of their reliance on racial classifications, the question of constitutionality would thus become whether there was any rational basis for a State to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On this question, the State argues, the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt and, consequently, this Court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial marriages.
Here’s an abstracted bit of the Court’s reasoning:
The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, in its opinion, stated that the legitimate purpose of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law was to “preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride.” Accordingly, the reason for Virginia’s law rests solely racial discrimination.
Racial classifications must be subjected to the most rigid scrutiny. Here, Virginia’s law serves no purpose other than to further invidious racial discrimination. As such, the law clearly violates equal protection. The State’s argument that the law is “applied” equally to whites and African-Americans must be rejected because same-race couples are not punished criminally.
Oral arguments in the Loving case were heard fifty-five years ago today.
The 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling unanimously overturned the Supreme Court’s previous unappealable last word on the subject, the definitive, unanimous 1883 ruling in Pace v. Alabama, where this Alabama law was upheld as perfectly constitutional in the United States of America:
If any white person and any negro, or the descendant of any negro to the third generation, inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation was a white person, intermarry or live in adultery or fornication with each other, each of them must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary or sentenced to hard labor for the county for not less than two nor more than seven years.
The question presented in 1883 was:
Since the state law of Alabama had a different set of statutes covering adultery and fornication between a white couple and a Black couple than that between an interracial couple, did the two year imprisonment of the interracial couple Tony Pace and Mary J. Cox violate their equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment?
9-0 the Pace court replied — nah! The unappealable law of the land for over eighty years, and the facts of Pace were arguably even “worse” than the facts in Loving, in that case the husband, Tony Pace, a Negro, had tried to marry a WHITE WOMAN!
Their marriage would have been illegal in the state of Virginia and all across the former Confederacy had it not been for the unanimous 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia [1]. An example of “judicial activism” that is on the table for these Federalist Society Six to overruleat last.
What harm could come from giving states back the authority to imprision citizens for race crimes, as the Framers arguably intended?
“we’re not partisan hacks!”
[1]
The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color,[note 1] and her white husband Richard Loving, who in 1958 were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored“. The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
On June 12, 1967, the Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings’ favor and overturned their convictions. Its decision struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender’s race, and thus it “equally burdened” both whites and non-whites.[4]
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